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On Being an M.O.T.Rosh Hashanah 5787/2026
by Rabbi Daniel Gropper
L'shanah tovah.
This past June my son Eli visited us from Israel. Even though it was game three of the NBA finals (Knicks in Five!), three dozen of you came to learn about his journey as an IDF soldier. Eli told a story that was new to me. It was his backstory for why he chose to make Aliyah and join the IDF.
During our first congregational trip to Israel back in 2006, Tamara realized that our 2 kids - then six and three - needed some time away from the group. Peeling off, she headed with them to the Carmel market. Holding her hand as they walked, Eli felt something. For the first time in his life, he noticed that people looked like him. And, because Tamara started speaking Hebrew to him when he was 18 months old, he understood what they were saying. This triggered something in him. He didn't have a word for it. On October 7th he found it.
Soon after that dark day, Eli learned that a teammate from his Israel lacrosse team was murdered at the Nova festival. Eli had to go to Israel. He did not "want to" go. Had to. In the weeks that followed, he found himself turning his six-year-old experience over, trying to understand what, exactly, pulled him to Israel, to this need to serve.
It wasn't religion. He didn't feel that God was obligating him, the way it might obligate others. It wasn't ethnicity, not really; by culture, he probably has more in common with an American Italian from Harrison or Rye than with the Mizrachi Jews serving beside him. And it certainly wasn't race, in any simple sense — demographically, a white, Ashkenazi, centrist Jew with pull, is its own kind of minority within Israeli society, not a majority anything. So what was it?
He couldn't completely express it, but last June, I found the answer at the AJC Global Forum. There, Author Dara Horn offered an explanation of Jewish civilization in a context that is worth repeating. "I'm often asked," she said, "when I go speak to non-Jewish audiences, are Jews a religion? Are Jews a race? Are Jews a nationality? There's an answer to this, and it's simple. It's not a complicated answer. It's just old. Jews predate every single one of those categories. Jews are a type of group that was common in the Ancient Near East yet very uncommon today; a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland and culture. While that is a sentence in English, in Hebrew, it's one word that's two letters long. Am. Jews are Am Yisrael. Until you understand that, nothing makes sense.”
And Dara continued, "But once you understand that, then you can start talking about the groundbreaking ideas of Jewish civilization that shaped world history: Monotheism, belief in one God, resistance to idolatry, the covenant. Today people hear those words and tune out because they think it's religion. In the ancient world, these are political ideas. In the ancient world, societies had lots of gods, and one of them was usually the dictator. When Jews say they don't bow to other gods, what they're actually saying is that they don't bow to a tyrant. Judaism has been an anti-tyrannical movement for the last 3,000 years. And it still is today. And this is the story we need to be telling ourselves and our neighbors about who we are."
So yes, we are an Am but I want to go one step further. Am, for all its truth, is a slightly passive word. It is a thing you are born into or choose to join and simply are.
שבט
There is a second word: shevet. Tribe. Shevet is active, not descriptive. In ancient paleo-Hebrew, where each letter symbolizes an object, Shin is a tooth — to press into. Bet is a house. Tet, that strange coiled letter, is a basket — containment, a place of protection. A tribe is, as Robert Frost put it more simply than any Hebrew grammarian ever managed: "The place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Many of us know it as, "Hinei, Mah Tov U'Manayim, Shevet Achim, Gam Yachad - How good and how pleasant it is for a tribe of siblings to be together." (Ps. 133:1) That sounds like a pretty good place to be.
Shevet is also the word for a shepherd's staff — the rod the psalmist invokes in the 23rd Psalm: "Shiv’te’cha U’mish’an’techa - Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me." A shepherd uses that staff to correct, and to comfort. That staff can prod a wandering sheep back into line and it can protect it from what's circling in the dark. That is tribe; something larger than yourself that protects you and in return, has every right to demand something of you. When your tribe calls, you feel the prod and get back in line. That is why, after October 7th, Israelis sat on the floor of El Al planes just to get home. That is why the reservist reporting rate hit 120 percent.
When I was in high school youth group we used to toss around a phrase that I don't hear much anymore, mostly because it sounds a little coarse to modern ears: we referred to each other as being an M.O.T. - a member of the Tribe. Perhaps it's time to bring it back.
Of course, we are hardly the only tribe left in the world. Swifties. English football supporters, Norwegians rowing in unison. Humans keep re-inventing tribe wherever the modern world has stripped it away. Something in our D.N.A. keeps pulling us back to it.
Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm, made that case in a book called Tribe. Modern Western life, he argues, has cost us the tight, mutual dependence of tribal life. He gives three examples: When colonial settlers were captured by Native American tribes, when given the chance, they routinely refused to return to "civilization.”; when Londoners were being bombed by Germany during the Blitz, suicide and mental illness rates dropped, because under shared catastrophe everyone was suddenly needed; and when combat veterans retuned home, what they missed most wasn't the violence but the communal reliance they had for each other. Junger noted that PTSD is aggravated by returning to a society that doesn't need you the way your unit did. Junger's core claim: we are wired for tribe, and affluent modernity is a slow-motion experiment in isolating us from it.
Junger wrote all of that in 2016, before any of us had fully reckoned with what's arrived since: a tribe cannot be simulated or scrolled into existence. Your Instagram followers are not your tribe. AI will flatter you, but it is not a companion; it's a vending machine dressed up as a friend, optimized for your engagement rather than your wellbeing. Part of what I'm asking of you this year is almost embarrassingly simple: put the phone down, and show up in a room instead. That is what it means to be shevet — to let yourself be pressed back into the fold, not scrolled into some algorithm's idea of belonging. Am. Shevet. Those are the words Eli felt at age six. They are the words he acted on after October 7th. Now, as part of an IDF infantry unit, where there is little to no time (hold up phone) for one of these, he feels that sense of belonging on a daily basis.
This past February, I came to an understanding of Am and Shevet on a gut level, in of all places, Radauți, Romania— a town of 24,000 near the Ukrainian border. It was there where my great-great-great-grandmother, Elke Laufer, was born into a community that once made up a quarter of the town's residents. Today, one synagogue and forty-five Jews remain.
We went to see that synagogue. Its leader, a 70-year-old man named Igo Kofler, who has lived in that town since his birth, walked us through what's left. Towards the end of our time, Igo took us to a large cabinet. Inside were stacks of old sacred texts and prayer books, worn and greying. "Please,” he said, “take some. You're a rabbi. With you, they might actually get used."
Then I noticed the scrolls — several of them, rolled and set apart from the rest. Igo explained: a man in town had recently bought a house. He found these scrolls in the attic. He had no idea what they were, only that they looked Jewish. He brought them to Igo hoping to sell them. Igo had nothing to offer. So the man simply left them. And there they sat.
Each was a partial Megilat Esther, just a few chapters of that sacred text. But the third scroll - this scroll - was complete. It was, the whole megillah. Its provenance is unknown, but it is entirely possible that my great-great-great-grandmother once sat and listened to its words. And here I was, two weeks before Purim, holding it in my hands.
There was no question. I had to bring it home.
We agreed on a price — half to the man who had found it, half toward the upkeep of the synagogue. As I handed over the money, I felt something I can only describe as redemption. Not just of a scroll but of a story. Of a family's memory that had been sitting, unclaimed, waiting for someone to come looking.
I had gone to Eastern Europe looking to reconnect with my roots, looking to see with my own eyes the places I had only heard about in family lore. What I hadn't expected was for those roots to reconnect me with something larger than my own family tree: that sense Am, of peoplehood; of Shevet, of tribal belonging, that sense of connection you cannot ignore. If you do, it is a failure of covenantal responsibility.
It matters that the scroll waiting to be redeemed was Megillat Esther. You know the basic story: a Jewish community under existential threat, saved by someone who happened to find herself positioned, however reluctantly, "for such a time as this." Before Esther ever approaches the king, the entire community fasts for three days. Not because fasting changes Achashverosh's mind, but because it is how a tribe lives its values out loud — the conviction, ancient and non-negotiable, that kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh: that all of Israel is responsible for one another.
That the scroll was Esther feels prophetic, for it speaks directly to such a time as this. We are living through a strange and painful convergence. From parts of the political right, we see a resurgent, sometimes barely-coded antisemitism — the old conspiracy theories about Jewish power and Jewish loyalty. From parts of the political left, we see something that presents itself as purely political — anti-Zionism — that increasingly slides into denying Jews, uniquely among peoples, the right to self-determination; into holding Jews everywhere accountable for one government's actions; into treating "Zionist" as a slur applied to any Jew who hasn't sufficiently disavowed Israel's existence. I don't say this to flatten every criticism of Israeli policy into antisemitism — thoughtful people, including plenty inside Israel itself, criticize this government far more sharply than most American critics do, especially the current violence perpetrated by extremist settlers who threaten to tear Israel apart from within and make her a pariah among the nations. I say it because, like many of you, I've watched two currents from opposite ends of the spectrum arrive, bent like a horseshoe, at the same destination: the conviction that we are the problem.
This isn't new, and it isn't spontaneous. As the organizer Eric Ward — a Black Christian who spent years embedded inside white nationalist movement studying how they recruit — told a gathering of Black pastors and rabbis in late August that I was privileged to be a part of, authoritarian movements don't invent antisemitism out of nothing. They organize the antisemitism that's already sitting there, waiting to be pointed at someone. "You cannot organize people around something they do not already believe," he said. “The vocabulary changes — globalist, elite, cabal — but the instruction underneath it never does: be afraid of each other.”
Friends, here is a sobering truth that is hard to say but must be. Jew hatred never went away. We just had a pleasant vacation from history for 80 years. Sadly, that genie is not going back into the bottle any time soon, if ever. The question for us is not how to defeat or to refute the lie. We spend $600 million a year trying to do just that. The question today is how to withstand it. Thankfully, this is something we have a lot of experience with.
What Junger and a forgotten scroll from Radauți are both trying to tell us — and what Ward, from an entirely different tradition, arrived at independently — is this: the answer to being targeted as a tribe is not to disband it. "What authoritarianism fears more than anything," Ward said, "is durable solidarity" — people who know how to stay in relationship with each other without walking away. It is not to assimilate our way to safety or to go silent about who we are. Nor is it to try to educate, to rationalize or merely to protest. The answer is to become, more deliberately, the good version of what our enemies fear — not hostility to outsiders, not circled wagons, but tribal the way Junger means it when describing the Blitz, or a platoon: bound by mutual obligation, where every person is needed and missed when absent, and safety is a shared question.
That is what Rosh Hashanah is for: the annual re-gathering of the tribe, the moment we stand shoulder to shoulder, hear the same shofar blast that members of our tribe have heard for 3000 years, and are reminded that we are written not into individual books of life, but into one book, together. Un'taneh Tokef doesn't ask what will happen to just me this year; it asks who among us will live and who will die, who by fire and who by water — about us, plural, a people whose fate has always been intertwined whether we liked it or not. To be a Jew, to be covenented to God and to each other means to be caught up in this web where my humanity, my whole being is inextricably bound up, in yours. That's the true meaning of tribe.
Comedian Alex Edelman has a line I can't stop thinking about: Judaism, he says, is a mailing list you can never unsubscribe from. It's a joke, and it's also just true. You can leave the shul, skip the seder, tell people you're "not really religious." The list keeps you on it anyway — antisemites never check whether you keep up your synagogue dues. The only real choice is whether we show up on our own terms, joyfully, as family — or the hard way, alone.
So here is what I want to leave you with as we enter 5787.
Somewhere in Radauți, this scroll survived because people refused to let each other go, even after almost everyone who once held it was gone. This scroll is still legible today for the same reason antisemitism and anti-Zionism will not succeed: because am Yisrael chai is neither a slogan nor just a nice song. It's a description of a fact that has held for three millennia through worse than this. We are an Am, a nation because we look out and see others who share a common story. We are a shevet, a tribe, because we know that whenever we show up, our tribe will take us in and whenever our tribe needs us, we will be there for it.
Junger says the modern western world has made us lonelier by making us safer and more separate. I'd add: it has also, at times, made us — Jews — try to disappear into that safety, to blend in, to hope that if we're quiet enough, we'll be left alone. Radauți tells a different story. This scroll survived not because it hid, but because people refused to throw it out, generation after generation, until it could be found.
This year, be found. Show up — not just over these ten days, but in the months ahead, for the tribe that needs you and that you need more than you may realize. Come for Shabbat. Sign up for our Jewish Information Class. Travel to Argentina to meet Jews down south who are also part of our tribe. Send your kids to Jewish Summer Camp. Make your teens come here to participate in our revamped program - don't give them a choice. Plan a trip to Israel. Notice who isn't in the room, and go find them. When you hear "Zionist" used as a slur, or "Jew" used as a conspiracy, don't retreat into silence — stand a little closer to the person next to you, the way Esther's people fasted together before she ever opened her mouth.
We are not, and have never been, a scattered set of individuals who happen to share some beliefs or common culinary tastes. We are a tribe — bound not by hostility to the world, but by responsibility to each other. That is what today is for. To look around to remind ourselves who our people are.
I'll close with something that happened to me recently, because it says more than any of my other sources. A member of our leadership here at Community Synagogue — a woman who chose this tribe rather than being born into it — asked me for a reading list. She wanted to understand what it actually feels like to be part of this people — to be, as our grandparents put it, an M.O.T. I shared a list of books with her but I also told her to spend an evening watching Jewish comedians like Modi, or Alex Edelman, or Elon Gold — sometimes the fastest way into a tribe's heart is through what makes it laugh at itself.
You see, she is already Jewish. Now she wanted to feel it in her bones, in her kishkes, to really get to know what it means to be a part of this people, a part of this tribe you can never unsubscribe from, the one Esther's people fasted for, the one that sat in an attic and then a cabinet in Radauți for who knows how long before it found its way into my hands. She chose, with open eyes, exactly what the rest of us were simply born owning.
My son Eli didn't come to me for a reading list. He came to this tribe the way most of us do — by being born into it — and it still took him nearly two decades, and a war, to find the word for what he'd felt as a six-year-old holding his mother's hand in the Carmel market. When it called on October 7th, he answered — because that is what shevet asks of us, and what Am simply is. Between the two of them — the woman who chose this tribe with her eyes wide open, and my son who was born into it and answered when it called — I see the whole of what I'm asking you today.
May we all, together, be written into the book of life. Not alone but as an Am, a people; not as individuals, but as a Shevet, a tribe. Am Yisrael Chai! Shevet Achim, Gam Yachad. L’Shana Tovah Tikateivu v’Tichateimu. And let us all say, Amen.